Putting Citroen on the Map

Joe Johnson

Coming to a PC, iPhone/iPad or Android near you: location –based interactive digital marketing? Geo-location services are all the rage at the moment, and with services like Facebook Places popping up all over people’s news feeds, marketers are keen to hijack the current buzz surrounding this new and exciting facet of Social Networking.

No stranger to imaginative advertising strategies, Citroen, who depicted their C4 transforming into a giant robot in a recent series of TV adverts, has just run an original and innovative campaign to promote its new DS3 hatchback in conjunction with Facebook and Google Maps.

The competition was branded ‘SteetSeekers’ and invited budding urban explorers to “virtually navigate” Google Maps in search of Citroen’s new hot hatch, the DS3, parked in a variety of city locations around the world. There were four separate parts of the DS3 to find, the location of each revealed only after you’d cracked some very cryptic clues. Upon finding the fourth part, users received a final hint to the whereabouts of the DS3 in its entirety, and those savvy enough to track it down were entered into a draw to win the very car they’d been hunting down! Citroen even added a neat ‘hot or cold’ indicator which lets users know when they are getting closer to the prize, providing they are within reasonable vicinity.

This idea takes full advantage of Google’s ‘streetview’ feature which has been sporadically appearing in the news of late, mainly causing controversy over privacy issues. It seems it is here to stay however and businesses are discovering ways to use it to their advantage. This is a clever campaign and one that possibly marks a shift among business towards using more geo-social services to promote their products.

With Foursquare, the geo-tagging pioneer, bubbling under the surface of the social hierarchy, Facebook Places gathering steam and ‘augmented reality’ mobile apps like Layar making the physical and digital worlds ever more intertwined, StreetSeekers just scratches the surface of what could be in store for interactive location-based digital marketing.